Portraits/autoportraits in the artistic practices of the Mediterranean region: an overlooked site?

The portrait and the autoportrait hold a prominent position in Art History. Painting and Literature, as well as Theater, Cinema and the Visual Arts, have all been trying to grasp, with their own artistic devices, the features of an individual, known or unknown, whereas various writers and artists have focused, at a particular moment, on the representation of the self.

For the painter, the portrait – an artistic representation of a specific person – allows him to trace, through the features of the face and the body, the psychological profile and the inherent nature of the subject. While the portrait has long been considered as a sub-genre compared to the major religious, mythical or historical subjects, it started establishing itself since the Seventeenth century, placing again the subject at the heart of aesthetic and philosophical research. As André Félibien wrote in 1667, the human face is the perfect work of God on Earth, and the one that succeeds to imitate it can claim excellence. More than “configuring the individual’s representation, the portrait is the figure of the individual in representation” (Goldberg, 13). On the other hand, the autoportrait, firstly in paintings and then in visual arts, is a “self-realization of the subject” and, through it, “an affirmation of the artist’s power”, but also of his/her concerns and of his/her troubled existentialist quest (Loubet, 137).

In film, the portrait occupies a special place, in documentaries and experimental practices, but without generating as of yet critical and academic studies proportionate to the existing production. Through portraits that film creates based on historical, public, familial or anonymous figures, cinema experiments with its own capacity to probe an individual’s interiority, and to capture, by the ways of film language, the place of the subject in his/her society and the World. As for the autoportrait, Cinema, as much as Painting or Literature, makes possible a discourse on the self: Cinema and later Video art (with technical material easier to handle), allows many filmmakers, “established or not, to create and talk about themselves and their lives in ‘cinematic form’” (Grange, 13).

What about artistic practices in the Arab region and the Mediterranean countries? What roles do the portrait and the autoportrait play in the contemporary experimental, documentary and fictional practices? In a region marked by violence and exile, self-reflection seems to be an escape from the real world, revealing a non-belonging to the world, a feeling inherited by past, recent and future generations of war… Portraits and autoportraits translate a need for memory, an assaulted memory of which one must seize some characteristics, to be able to face the world and confront History.

In that respect, and through aesthetic as well as cultural approaches, we aim to address the question of the pertinence of the portrait and the autoportrait in the socio-cultural and political contexts of a specific artistic practice, within the Arab countries and, by extension, the countries of the Mediterranean as primary sites of analysis. What roles do those pictural conventions play in Memory Studies of societies going through crisis? What does it reveal of the role and place of the artist within his/her own society?

The main axes of research covered by this issue include, but not exclusive, to the following topics:

The journal focuses on Film Studies, Theater Studies and Visual Arts in general, in the MENA region as well as Mediterranean countries. It is published twice a year and is trilingual (French, English and Arabic). It comprises a call for papers section, a Varia section and a reviews section.

For its second issue, Regards launches a call for papers for its thematic dossier as well as for its Varia section.

The journal has an editorial committee, a reading committee, as well as a scientific committee. The first scientific committee, nominated for three years, is as follows: